Incredible slideshow of a War of the Worlds photoshoot for a book cover. By Larry Knox, and available here. Sounds dry, I know, but SQUID! SQUID! SQUID!
Category Archives: Squid
shit-eating grins, Nyarlathotep, and LiveJournal
Like many humanoids, I have several friends who use the expression "shit-eating grin" on a regular basis. Probably more than they use their shit-eating grin muscles. And, unfortunately, like most of the world, they're using it wrong.
Every. Single. Time.
The expression "shit-eating grin," which surely deserves to go down in history as one of the 20th Century's greatest contributions to vocabulary (think about it…vocabulary of the 20th Century…you take my point) was originated, like white suits and pretentious hepcatism, by American author Tom Wolfe. It comes from…oh god, I hope I can find it before WordPress goes down again…lately it's been up and down more than a toi- what was I just saying about 20th Century vocab? See!
Ah, bugger it! When in doubt, go to memory. Since I haven't read that piece for at least ten years, I'm quite impressed with my own memory. It's from "Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers," of course. And it's the expression the poor white flack-catcher affixes to his face for the duration of his verbal beat-down by the Samoans.
The man is being paid to go out there and listen to these people, or at least to sit there and take shit and nod as if he's paying attention, and then to go away and undertake lengthy and expensive therapy to forget about the whole thing. And he has to sit there and take this shit with a polite, encouraging smile on his face, which is somewhat hard to do in a room full of hostile, seven-foot, three hundred pound Samoan activists who are pounding on the floor and chanting. And so his grin becomes fixed. It becomes a rictus. It becomes the grimace the kindly country doctor finds on the face of the mindless yet still uncannily animated corpse of the poor sap who only came out to Arkham to do geneological research and has instead glimpsed the undisguised visage of Nyarlathotep and now cannot stop giggling. And crying.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what a shit-eating grin truly is.
So…
I have one on my face right now, for lo, thanks to Gawker I have found something of value on LiveJournal.
Fuck.
P&Ls and how books make (or don't) money: part the first: the mass market original complete failure
In which I explain how we figure out how much money to pay authors for their advance, and also in which I explain how sometimes books make money and sometimes they don't…
Which is really just a more detailed version of something Lori Dunn did at the Shebeen Club a few months back. Sooo nice to be ahead of Manhattan. Still, I'll be an wizened old grannie by the time Gawker gives ME a shout-out. Mark is so much more accessible!
Operation Global Media Domination: Gay Pirates kick Bloggers Ass
The raincoaster blog is quite proud and, in fact, almost insufferable about the fact that we have cracked the top 350,000 blogs in Technorati. If you've done better than that, we don't want to hear about it. No, really. We get all weepy and snappish when we hear about that sort of thing unless it's accompanied by a heartfelt "and let me teach you exactly how I did that" email.
PeterPan, I'm talking to you.
And while it's nice to be promoted so my stat counter starts at 30, rather than zero, there's a brief yet heart-stopping period every day when I appear to have negative readers. And we all know my readers are as positive little bundles of human sunshine as it is possible to be, right? Totally, bitches!
In a search term roundup this week, it is quite clear that Gay Pirates kick the ass of all blog-related posts. There are the classic greatest hits: mango porno, Narnia porn, and octopus sewing patterns. And curling. Lotsa curling.
Eagles are good, too. Raptors apparently rank high in the blogosphere; I can see that, you know. Winging through the sky, falling upon their prey like a thunderbolt, soaring in regal isolation, making Technorati their bitch.
Today in Giant Knitted Squid News: The Great Cat Battle
Is this truly the last thing Cthulhu sees, just before he's ripped to shreds? I thinkest so.
Because hey, who doesn't want their baby to look as if it's being devoured by one of the Elder Gods, eh?
Note: the Giant Squid is a blogger! Who knew?
I, my Semitic friend, am a GIANT SQUID. Archteuthis archteuthis. The terrible kraken of the deep. And my axons are as thick around as the tip of one of my tentacles, or as thick perhaps as your much-vaunted opposable thumb.
COLOSSAL…shrimp
No, seriously!
News comes, via Sploid, that a biologist in Columbia has purchased the world's most incredibly ginormous, huge, lumbering, colossiod, towering…
shrimp.
Says the biologist:
"This is the biggest species ever known here or even in literature! The big difference, which could also be harmful for us, is that this species is a predator and it could end native species!"
Nearly the size of a man's foot, this incredible monster was finally landed, after an unnamed and (no doubt) unnameable struggle, by innocent Columbian fishermen, momentarily ignorant of the cosmic shudders sent echoing to the very depths of the abyss where the blind idiot god Azathoth bubbles and blasphemes at the center of the universe for eternity, by their bumbling, oblivious capture of this, the very Fungi of Yuggoth.
You say kebab, I say ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
raincoaster 